- Jefferies Financial Group is offering its 1,124 analysts and associates a choice of luxurious gifts.
- They can choose between a Peloton, a Mirror Home Workout System, and a bundle of Apple products.
- The firm’s two top executives announced the news in a memo shared by Instagram’s Litquidity account.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Junior bankers at Jefferies may feel like they’ve been putting the pedal to the metal at work lately — but now, Jefferies execs are about to put some actual pedals under their feet.
Jefferies Financial Group CEO Rich Handler and president Brian Friedman, the top executives at the investment bank, sent a memo to their 1,124 analysts and associates worldwide on Thursday offering them their choice of gifts to thank them for a year of grinding and producing strong results for the firm.
On offer: a Peloton at-home workout bike with a one-year subscription; a Mirror Home Workout system with a one-year subscription; or a suite of Apple products including the Apple Watch, iPad, AirPods Pro, and AppleCare+ coverage. Analysts and associates have one week to pick one.
Due to geographic restrictions on Peloton’s availability, the at-home indoor cycling bike is available to Jefferies employees in the US, the UK, Germany, and Australia while the Mirror Home Workout System is only available to US employees. The suite of Apple products is available to associates and analysts worldwide.
In their letter, the Jefferies execs thanked their junior employees.
“We are incredibly grateful for all of the analysts and associates across Jefferies around the world who support so much of what we do every day,” Handler and Friedman said in the memo.
“We have emphasized the need for all of us to do the best we can do to maintain our health and well-being, including a healthy diet and exercise, and to this end we also have organized various classes and education sessions,” the executives wrote.
“You have given us your all these past 12 months and these gifts are a sign of our deep appreciation for your dedication, sacrifice and contribution to our success in the face of challenging circumstances,” they added.
The memo was first shared on Thursday by the finance-meme account Litquidity, a popular Instagram page within the financial services community. The account has previously hosted live Zoom lunches with Handler during the pandemic, Insider reported last year.
A strong fiscal year for Jefferies made the gifts possible
A person familiar with Jefferies’ decision to distribute the gifts said the firm recognized the past year has weighed heavily on younger industry workers. As a result, it was beneficial to the firm to keep the junior bankers in good spirits mentally and in good health physically.
What’s more, the firm has had a strong performance fiscally over the past 12 months.
In January, Jefferies announced record quarterly net revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020 ($1.6 billion), in addition to a firm-high quarterly net revenue in investment banking ($916 million).
That’s a significant increase over the firm’s Q4 2019 results one year prior: $393 million in investment-banking net revenues, and $748 million total net revenues overall.
For junior bankers who do select a Peloton, they’ll may be focused on a different set of numbers, though: the fitness bike’s leaderboard. And, if they’re hoping to smoke the competition, they may find a formidable rival in another of their Jefferies’ colleagues: Handler himself.
In December, Handler — who is a popular presence on Instagram with nearly 29,000 followers — posted his personal Peloton stats to his Instagram story.
He revealed the performance stats from a high-intensity interval and hills class he had taken, which was taught by Peloton trainer Olivia Amato, a former Jefferies employee who worked in equity research sales.
Upon completion of the class, Handler achieved a ranking of 4,635 out of 35,921 riders — putting him in roughly the top 13% percent of its participants.
A taxing period for junior bankers
The news of Jefferies’ gifts for its younger talent came on the same day that the Litquidity Instagram account posted results from a February survey which was developed and conducted by 13 first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs about hours logged and working conditions.
The findings underscore the difficulties younger talent have faced, painting a picture of nights comprising just five hours of sleep, exhaustive 98-hour work weeks, and as many as 77% of respondents saying they felt they had been a victim of workplace abuse.
The person familiar with Jefferies’ thinking said that the concerns raised by the Goldman Sachs analysts did not catalyze the firm to roll out its surprise rewards on Thursday. The plans had been in the works for about a month, requiring significant logistical legwork to make them possible.
A hybrid work model when the pandemic finally retreats
As far as the bank’s plan around returning to the office, Jefferies is coalescing around a hybrid work model that would enable a rotational system in which workers would be able to come into the office and spend time working from home.
The firm conducted an internal survey of its employees to find out how they would most prefer to adapt their work arrangements once the pandemic wanes, the person said, noting that the clear preference was for a hybrid model that would amalgamate both work from home and work from the office.
Jefferies’ hybrid model is likely to be contrasted by the back-to-the-office approaches at other firms.
Finance industry CEO’s like Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and Evercore’s Ralph Schlosstein have indicated in recent days and weeks that they’re eager to see workers — particularly younger talent — back to the office, sooner than later.
Jefferies, meanwhile, has encouraged employees not to come back to the office ahead of schedule.
In a recent letter from December, Handler and Friedman wrote: “We are thinking warmly of the days in the future when each of us gradually will begin to visit our Jefferies team offices around the globe and be able to spend time in person with each other and with our clients. That will be wonderful, but for now, we must make the best of the reality that for most all of us working from home is the smart and safe thing to do.”
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